Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Julianne Nicholson
Will Arnett
John Krasinski
Joey Slotnick
Clarke Peters
Frankie Faison
Chris Meloni
Directed By:
John Krasinski
The least I can say about John Krasinski is that he's fearless. Not only he's the first director to have the balls to adapt David Foster Wallace to cinema, but he also chose a short story collection rather than a novel of a story alone. Knowing the fractured and non-linear vision Wallace had of literature, you have to admire the balls of Krasinski for trying to make a coherent eighty minutes about desperate men searching for answers to existential dread.
In order to make the story more easy to follow, Krasinski decided to streamline things and give the silent interviewer an identity. She is Sara Quinn (Nicholson), a grad student, who decided to conduct a research on the effects of feminism on men after a nasty break-up with his boyfriend Ryan (Krasinski himself, he has a funny looking face). Well, that's what I think the chronology is, because the movie doesn't exactly respects any sort of temporality. Interviews are cut with bits of Sarah's life, which is as empty as the academic life can get. This is where the movie loses most of its point. Krasinski's stance of having a feminist researcher driven by empty and vengeful thoughts make you put Wallace's writing in his perspective and makes some of the monologues lose their steam.
Even more twisted, the strength of Wallace's writing catches back to the story and end up making Sara look weak and pathetic. The whole idea behind the hideous men was to prove there was a genuine distress behind the many clichés of male shallowness. Krasinski turns Sara's character into a point of competition in between the sexes about who's more genuine than the other. It's sad, but it's a choice the director had to make to turn Brief Interviews With Hideous Men into a movie. There's a lot of smart idea, like those two undergrad students always turning around Sara are having the role of live footnotes. They pepper the movie with their idiosyncratic presence, break and ultimately take integral part to the movie.
In the end, the text wins. Helped with amazing actors like Frankie Faison (Commissioner Burrell, in The Wire), who delivers a ghastly, unforgettable performance as Subject #42, Wallace's words keep their magic. Time stops, your life doesn't matter anymore and you almost fully synchronize your existence to those of his desperate characters. Even from beyond the grave, Wallace keeps being haunting and not completely reachable. He will never be. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a very ambitious movie, but in the end, its most impressive achievement is that it demonstrated that Wallace cannot be fully crammed in an eighty minutes feature.
SCORE: 73%
